| dc.description.abstract | In the past few years there has been an increase in hybrid organisations. Hybrid organisations are characterised by their tendency to combine opposing organisational elements, such as corporate elements with a societal mission. Their inherent complexity results in internal conflicts between hybrid identities, and these conflicts affect the extent to which the opposing organisational goal are sustained over time. Sharing Economy (SE) organisations engage in hybrid organising as they often operate within contradicting logics. The extant literature has investigated the hybridity of SE organisations from an institutional logics perspective, yet little attention has been given on how hybridity manifests at an internal level. This thesis fills this knowledge gap by examining the impact of the identity conflicts that result from the hybridisation process of Couchsurfing (CS), a mission-oriented free accommodation sharing platform. For this, a qualitative analysis of archival data that spans the period between 2006 and 2020 and interviews with former CS volunteers are conducted to identify the identities that shaped tensions in the organisation of the platform’s hybridity. The main findings suggest that the identity at CS shifted over time from a uniform community identity, to three main identities. The identified identities: Community, Missionary and Corporate were found to conflict over time on three main dimensions these being a conflict over the source of authority of the platform, the role of growth of traffic on the platform, and the role of monetisation. The main resulting impacts of the conflicts on the platform were the abandonment of the platform by mission-oriented users and the increased traffic of non-mission-oriented users labelled as freeloaders, the misalignment between host and guest motivations to participate in the platform, and the failure to implement a sustainable revenue generating model that would keep CS profitable without harming the balance between host and guest relationship. The findings of this study contribute to the literature by conceptualising the impact of conflicting identities on the organisation of an SE platform. With this, the history and unique case of CS revealed the challenges of sustaining dual conflicting goals in the context of non-monetised host-guest interactions, and the research elaborates on the understanding of SE platform failures. This research comes out as illuminating for managers of mission-oriented SE organisations as it illustrates how internal tensions over the opposing goals at the organisational can affect platform’s success. | |
